


The Dimming Road

by threesmallcrows



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Possibly Happy Ending?, Tragedy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:06:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3210254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As you are, you’re Tadashi’s shadow. Living the bad side of his life like an echo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dimming Road

 

_This kid—looked at me, like a vision._

 

_I could see how he’d turn bad._

()

 

You’re fourteen, and you’re a genius.

 

You’re fourteen, and your brother is dead.

 

And you can’t reconcile those two facts, can’t force them onto the same plane of existence because one was before and the other wasn’t and aren’t geniuses supposed to understand everything—yet this, you just can’t, get, your head—around.

 

So you, you’re smart, you think to yourself maybe it’s better not to go to college. You think, what do I need instead?

 

Robot fights.

 

Hah, yeah, you’re a genius all right, smart as they make them (and anyways, you don’t think you can stand to look at the microbots right now, what he pushed so hard for, his dreams, that damn smile—).

 

So you bring out your little back-alley scrapper under neon and moon, and you switch his dopey yellow face to the red demon, and sometimes you forget to switch it back. Eventually the red demon stays, because he always wins.

 

The cash comes in head-over-ears and before you make the dumbass decision of gifting Aunt Cass ten-thousand in cold bills she has no clue. But, oh, does she lay it in to you then. And you still don’t understand—now she can do that kitchen remodel she’s always talked about, so what’s the problem?

 

No problem, right?

 

She grounds you. You barely manage to hide your laughter. You’re fourteen and feel wild and raging at heart. You dance down the fire escape half-manic and win another three matches the same night, and this time you keep the winnings to yourself.

 

You’re starting to lose your manners, the timidity, that whole doe-eyed shtick, an edge of something hard growing in your face. Someone accuses you of cheating and you smirk something back and it’s fists in an alleyway, always alleyways, whether under neon or moon. You swing wildly and miss. Then it’s knuckles in your stomach and your chin on the floor. You chip a tooth. Taste blood. You try and call Tadashi, and speed-dial Honey Lemon on accident. You don’t realize until you hear the voicemail message. You hang up, rest your face on the flagstone.

 

You’re fourteen, but you won’t always be, and when you’re big enough, it’s them that’ll have to watch out.

 

You’re fifteen and you’re bored and still mourning. You’ve routed all the players worth beating in San Fransokyo, seen so many alleyways they blur. Most of the days seem grey, under neon or moon. You give in to Aunt Cass and go to college—not Tadashi’s, one several cities away, and she doesn’t push. The labs there are mostly empty, devoid of laughter. You take advantage and build, and build, and build. Trade alleyways for white tables and benches and cabinets, a beautiful sterile closed system where an army of sprinklers crouches at the ready for even the hint of fire. Late nights in the lab transition into sleeping at the lab. Dry eyes and energy drinks and stale breath; your roommate hardly sees you.

 

Sometimes you listen to their voice messages. There are still voice messages, at fifteen.

 

You never respond to any of them.

 

You’re set to graduate three years from now and you think you might die of boredom before you ever get there.

 

Restless, you edge back into the fighting scene. It’s smaller here, more intense, more involved; the sense at every match is that blood might fly. You have parts shipped to the university’s lab and when you ignore the first warning letter, and the second. When they threaten you with suspension around the fifth or sixth, you save them the trouble and drop out. The people at university never liked you anyway—you were too young, too weird, still too doe-eyed and yet an edge of something hard in your face. Too incongruous. In the scene, nobody likes anybody, and things are that much easier for it. You win some and lose some. You sleep on an air mattress in your new apartment—no furniture but a workman’s bench, cords trailing everywhere and power drills and monitors on the unused kitchen counters, takeout in a minifridge, the actual refrigerator backup storage for gasolines, lubricants, chemicals.

 

You almost manage to forget your sixteenth. You’re high off some drug, some sick kick twisted up in a bit of white paper, celebratory offerings after another successful match. You don’t think you like it very much. Alcohol, drugs, girls, none of that. Work’s still all that does it for you. But you consciously avoid making anything productive. Fighting ‘borgs, explosives, cute little viruses that’ll turn anyone’s stomach.

 

Yeah maybe you’re wrestling a ghost. Ghosts don’t exist, but ghosts don’t go away.

 

Sixteen is flat, sixteen is fast. Your weight moves as easily as a bungee-cord, ten pounds off and fifteen on and ten off again. Near the end of sixteen you hear the snap of gum and a drawl outside your door and hide like a kid, shaking and wedged under your workbench as GoGo threatens to kick the damn door down and Fred pleads with you. You’re not there, you’re nonexistent, you tell your dimmed lights, emergency-powered-down in a panic. You close your eyes as the pounding increases and will yourself into the dark.

 

They leave, eventually, and you tell yourself _of course, they’re_ his _friends, not mine._ Whisper all these lies to yourself over the wash of two years of unopened messages, emails, texts.

 

You’re seventeen and starting to look it, still long bangs, very little doe left in the eyes. Someone sidles up to you after a match and offers you some work. Not interested, you say by default, and he laughs and tells you it’ll be a lot more worthwhile than bullfighting bots. Something clicks, maybe just too much boredom, your mind aching for a challenge not thought up by yourself.

 

The first contacts are online, through a chat client, and it’s sketchy business and probably illegal, but you’ve never had a problem with that, were never the ideologist or the pure one in the family. You write some code, send the person on the other side some of the cuter viruses bound and locked for them to inspect.

 

You’re graduated to triple-encrypted emails, then meetings in basements, always basements. You don’t care for those, aren’t much for the ideology, the flag-burning. You’ve gotten out of the habit of being around people anywhere other than around a fighting ring. If that even counts.

 

You want—

 

You want…

 

You work. Rubbing your thin wrists, you burn the midnight oil, the candle at both ends, whatever. Rules aren’t made for geniuses. You haven’t fallen back on that saying in a while, but these days you’re feeling it less and less.

 

Ticking off all these assignments, these cryptic tasks, is almost fun. Like playing spy games. Except—nothing like, nothing at all. They, or whoever, the group, the _team,_ takes over San Fransokyo’s mayor’s Twitter using one of your little pets. The news has a bit of a blow-up about it, but this, the leader (or whoever) tells you, is just a stunt, a bit of publicity. A toe in the water, if you will. You are the talent, you are fire in the hole, and you are aware that if you’re going to jump ship you’d best do it before you hit deeper waters, but it pays and it fills the time and it’s a little less than boredom, and really that’s all just like the bot fights—same rules apply.

 

Since you’re not stupid, you take the necessary precautions, anonymity, encryption, sending your IP jumping through so many hurdles that it comes out a different showhorse altogether on the other end. Become a shadow within the shadow. Lucky you never used your real name fighting all that time. Still, there are some handoffs that need to take place in person. You wear a baseball cap for those, a hoodie, the ill-fitting uniform of an angry young thug. You are young, but mostly not angry anymore, not feeling much, definitely not a thug. San Fransokyo is gentrifying fast and the whole city crawls with the tech glitterati, and sometimes you wonder how you’d look on the other side of that divide, young and happy and hoodied—

 

But that side is your brother’s side, the path he would have chosen.

 

Aunt Cass calls, _come home for Christmas, Hiro, I haven’t seen you in forever._

 

Too busy at school, Aunt Cass. Sorry. But maybe spring break? If I get the chance.

 

Tadashi was never good at lying.

 

At eighteen you don’t do much. Your birthday lands on a grey day in June and you curl under blankets, scrolling sideways down their newsfeeds under eighteen layers of security, caution-not-paranoia. Honey Lemon’s up for a big NSF grant. Wasabi’s smiling with a girl, big arm around thin shoulders, grins like watermelon slices. Fred’s wall is all ridiculous stoner-food and selfies; GoGo’s is tags from other people, her standing cool on the side or a blur of motion in the background.

 

On Christmas Day the bombs go off, all round the top of the Transamerica Building like fireflowers in a daisy crown. You stare at the television and think to yourself, _get real._ It’s beyond time to relinquish your hold on your brother. You are gone so much farther than he could ever have imagined. Would ever have let you fall.

 

When you fall asleep you dream of fire around your head and wake screaming, neighbor pounding on your onionskin wall and yelling at you to shut up. You stuff your fist in your mouth, scrabble for your phone and clutch it against your chest like a shield, or a defibrillator if your heart bursts like it feels like it will.

 

You nearly make that call. Nearly.

 

But loneliness has grown on you like a mold or a parasite and in a second you’re back in its clutches. You shove the phone away, resentful. Since you’re awake anyway, you might as well work.

 

The work continues to come in after that. There are no more meetings, no more hand-offs. You’re doing a lot more code, a lot less tinkering. You miss the tinkering. You think absently about getting yourself a dog, or making one.

 

One Saturday morning you take the bus down to San Fransokyo with a hangover and a fever, hop the trolley to the coffee shop and peer cautiously around the corner. Aunt Cas seems cheery through the window, whirling between her customers, an aproned dervish.

 

You’re supposed to be graduating in the spring. Don’t know how you’re going to fake that one.

 

When someone calls your name your first instinct is to run. You don’t, but it’s close. You let Wasabi, massive and warm as ever, engulf you in a hug, back stiffening at the contact.

 

He tries to talk you inside the café like a stray dog, coaxing you with food and warmth and warm hands, but you are too rabied for his gentle self. You back away, hackles up, baring your teeth in a smile.

 

Some other time, you say, wiping your weeping nose on your wrist. Nice seeing you around, and turn away quickly. You don’t want to see yourself reflected in his eyes.

 

You go underground at nineteen. The stakes of this game you’ve been playing have been rising, slowly and treacherously as the water before a flood, and now the dam’s about to go under. Cutting ties with them isn’t an option anymore, you tell yourself. You know too much—contributed too much. The hive’s been a frenzy since Transamerica. They’re going bigger, next, more devastating. You think of bustling San Fransokyo, all the throughfares and squares with their abundance of lives ripe for the plucking—Union, Civic Center, the piers, the Golden Gate bridge. The café, even. Is it beyond belief?

 

No one tells you anything. They feed you orders like a guard tossing a foodpan through a prisoner’s slot. You type, wearing braces to support your wrists and ward off the early onslaught of carpal tunnel.

 

You’ve got to stop. You’ve got to. But you don’t know how.

 

You move at four in the morning. Stray dogs bark at you in the street and a homeless man stirs angrily in his sleep as you scurry past, clutching the only equipment you need to your chest. You rent a hotel room at the seediest motel you can find—your new base of operations. More lightweight, easier to run.

 

Working there is a nightmare. The room stinks of cigarette smoke and faintly of piss; the tub is stained with unidentifiable gunk and the water comes out sometimes brown and usually not hot. There is no heat and the bones in your hand ache with the cold. Someone is always arguing, or running up and down the hall, or brawling, smashing into your locked door so hard you’re afraid it’ll come off its arthritic hinges. You sleep with a baseball bat wedged between your scratchy pillow and the wall.

 

The most maddening thing is that you have more than enough money to live someplace else. Hell, Aunt Cass would probably be glad to have you move back in with her.

 

But you don’t have the most important part: the freedom. You _need_ to live here; the secrecy needs to live here, and the paranoia, the looking-over-the-shoulder and the nightmares of fire, and the work, always the work.

 

One day, you break. You gather your laptop and charger and dump all the other electronics in a lockbox that you hide beneath the bed. You make an attempt to tame your hair and step out of your door, past a drug deal in progress, and out and away. It takes three buses, two metro line changes and a twenty-minute walk to get to the Institute, and you feel your chest untwist a little as you step inside the front gate.

 

Feeling immensely self-conscious, you duck into a coffee shop filled with people your age, mutter an order for an iced latte—that’s what people order, isn’t it? You don’t know. Everyone around you looks so much younger than you feel. The laughter is stifling and you feel allergic.

 

You escape to the lawn outside the robotics lab. But you can’t bear to sit there. The sense of danger is higher than anything you’ve felt while running these past few years. _They_ could show up, any of them. Within ten minutes you’re out the university gates, breathing hard, plastic coffee cup crumpled in your fist.

 

At the apartment, your mirror is dingy and covered with dust. You breathe and blow. Dust churns the air like a man treading water. A bit gets up your throat the wrong way and you cough and cough, kneeling on the floor. When the golden grain has settled you look at yourself. You’ve never looked more like Tadashi. If you got a haircut, ate a bit more…

 

As you are, you’re Tadashi’s shadow. Living the bad side of his life like an echo.

 

Tadashi died when he was twenty. Tomorrow, you’ll reach him. In another hundred or so, you’ll pass him by. He has always stood before you, even when he was snuffed from the earth like a candle, and the road has been dim since you were fourteen, but soon you’ll be flying blind.

 

You’re so frightened, so absolutely petrifyingly terrified by this. You take a single pill of Ambien and lie stiff on your bed like you’re waiting for death.

 

You wake to unholy pounding like a drumbeat, and in the still-thick haze of the sedative you think you’re still a kid, that you’re late to school again and it’s Tadashi come to wake you. “Five minutes,” you mumble, and they kick the door down.

 

In the long run of things, you suppose you’re lucky it’s the police and not someone else. But—

 

You’re twenty, and you go to prison.

 

This time, you’re on the other side of the bars.

 

There is no Tadashi with you. The juvenile side of the holding cell is empty.

()

 

_This kid—looked at me, like a vision. I could see how he’d turn bad._

 

_So I changed it._

()

 

You’re fourteen.

 

Aunt Cass grounds you, and you barely manage to contain your laughter. She lets you get away with it the first night. The second, she locks you into your room from the outside. When you make for the fire escape, she’s standing at the foot. You think she’s going to yell. She hugs you instead, and you can’t find the strength to keep the bot in your hands when she takes it gently away,

 

Or,

 

Your blood is on the floor. You mean to call Tadashi, but it’s Honey Lemon that picks up instead. You don’t speak for long. You hang up, lay your head down on the flagstone. In ten minutes, headlights rake like sunrays across the alleyway, obliterating neon and moon, and you hear the click of heels, running,

 

Or,

 

You break at the fifth voice message and dial Fred back. You don’t mean to speak for long. You end up talking for nearly two hours. A little about robotics, a little about the university, a little about Tadashi. For some reason you’re crying at the end, sobbing into the telephone. You’ve been so damn lonely all year. Come home, lil’ dude, Fred tells you. We miss you. You cry and cry and nod, wiping your nose on your wrist,

 

Or,

 

The pounding at the door is almost as loud as the pounding in your chest. What to do, what to do? Your hands are sweaty as you flick the deadbolt. A second later GoGo’s sneaker busts into the thick, stale air of your apartment like an anchor plunging into water.

 

Or,

 

Aunt Cass calls, _come home for Christmas._ You go home.

 

Or,

 

You catch a glimpse of yourself in Wasabi’s eyes. You look—nothing so important as a wreck; you just look sad and small and childish and ill. You blink heavily, forehead hot. The sidewalk weaves gently, like the metro negotiating a curve. A second later his hands are on you, holding you up. He tells you you’re burning up and you don’t disagree, folding yourself against his body like a little bird as he hauls you towards the café door.

 

Or,

 

You sit heavily on the university lawn as if your legs have collapsed beneath you. You sit there through the hazy afternoon, crushed by the conversations happening around you, laughter tangling around your ankles like spiderwebs or quicksilver. You sit through the long summer sunset and then you sit in the evening dark, shivering. A light comes on at the far end of the lawn, and a lanky man in a security uniform comes over to you. Are you all right, he asks, and you bite your tongue.

 

Finally, in a rusty voice that creaks on the first syllable like an unused door turning, you tell him you’ve been looking for someone.

 

Or,

 

Turn,

 

turn.

 

Turn.

 

()

 

_Fin._

 


End file.
